Tzohar Biloxi – Helping Rebuild After the Storm

by Joanne Palmer

Dr. Richard Lederman, one of 17 Conservative Jews who spent five days helping with the cleanup of still-hurricane-ravaged Biloxi as part of United Synagogue’s Tzohar Biloxi, found the trip “moving, tiring, exhilarating, disturbing, touching – all of those things.”

The fourteen volunteers and three staffers, who came from places as various as Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles; Raleigh, North Carolina; Boston; Baltimore; Chicago; and Montclair, New Jersey, converged on Biloxi for hands-on work. The group, whose members ranged in age from 16 to 60, included a man who has cerebral palsy but who “worked on this project with us and was undaunted,” said Dr. Lederman, who is the director of both our social action commission and our Seaboard region. “We gutted buildings, we took care of orphan animals in an animal shelter, we fed the homeless, we cleared debris, and we dismantled the wood frame of a temporary day care center,” he added.

Taking apart that wooden frame – about 60 feet across and 40 feet deep, put together like a floor with all its joints tied together – wasn’t easy. “We were working hard on projects that most of us don’t do, like pulling nails out of joints with crowbars, and breaking apart wood framing with sledgehammers. We worked hard, and we loved it,” Dr. Lederman said. “And we helped each other. You would put down a tool, and someone else would grab it. It was ‘you do this, and now I’ll do this.’ We almost completely finished it in five hours, and it felt really good.”

Tzohar Biloxi members spent about half their time in Biloxi at work, and the other half of the time talking to Biloxi residents and to each other about what they had seen. They were subdivided into smaller groups for work assignments; one of them, led by Seaboard assistant director Jo-Anne Tucker-Zemlak, cleaned off the muck that had coated someone’s memorabilia, restoring the objects that told the story of her life.

For Dr. Lederman, the physical work – done in conjunction with Hands On Gulf Coast – only part of the point. “For me it wasn’t so much the doing with my hands as it was being there, talking to people, seeing what people were going through, seeing what the place looked like,” he said. For him, the problem so starkly posed in places like Biloxi and New Orleans, both victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, both still largely unfixed, is “the understanding that they show is that there are still core structural issues in our society,” he said. “We can go down there and help Biloxi and New Orleans and the Gulf coast, but inevitably there will be another disaster somewhere else. We as a society have to take responsibility for each other, at a governmental and at a societal level, to resolve these and other issues.

“I felt confirmed in my understanding that we Jews really need to reassume the mantle of prophetic Judaism, which calls on us to commit ourselves in ongoing powerful advocacy on behalf of people who are homeless and hungry and marginalized and disenfranchised in our society,” Dr. Lederman continued. “While our project-oriented social action activity is needed and helpful and very appreciated, there are core structural issues that we must tackle. While it may be challenging in terms of building consensus, we have to take on that challenge.

“I’ll be blunt. It’s not just Biloxi. It could happen to me – it could happen to any of us. There could be a tornado, a flood, and I could be homeless. Homelessness, poverty, lack of health care, lack of education, lack of emergency relief – these are structural issues. How do we as a society come together to solve these core problems? What we do as a society to help each other is the issue. And it is that sort of issue that we as a Jewish community tend to avoid. We’re afraid that it might be too political, too divisive, but heck, it’s a part of our core values, it’s a Torah value, to create a just, compassionate, righteous society.”